The Second Leg of the Journey
Theological Book Network’s previous article described the journey of a shipment of books from Grand Rapids to Ukraine. From truck to train to boat, using cranes to load and unload, this is a very involved and carefully planned process. But what happens once those books have made it to that destination? How do they get from a freight container to hundreds of different schools throughout the country?
The simple answer is that TBN has hub schools that they work with, and these hub schools have very important responsibilities. These hub schools are normally well established and have a good working relationship with TBN. Once the shipment arrives at port, we hand the distribution baton over to our friends on the other side of the shipment, wherever that might be.
TBN will make a packing list for each individual box with its contents and what institution it belongs to. The hub schools will receive a list of institutions and how to get their packages to said institution. Some schools come and pick up their books if they can make it to the hub school. Most of the boxes will be shipped. When people think of shipping a package, we often think of heading to FedEx, our local post office, or possibly trucking company for the big items. Either way, in America, it is normally just a phone call or an email away. This is not the case for shipments in the Majority World. This often involves trucks that aren’t exactly the delivery trucks we think of. In fact, here is a quote from an email we received from the organizer at OTS: “We have found out that one truck was overloaded and some of the palettes were protruding outside of the truck and covered only by a tarp.” Because of this, “his overloaded truck traveled only at night to avoid penalizing in interstate check-gates for the overloaded carriage.”
It is a big challenge to ship books around the world! To reach as many areas as we can involves not only shipping port to port but then planning how they will be dispersed to all these specific institutions in hard-to-reach areas. Most of these books do not take the route of a normal Amazon delivery, yet most of these books do make it exactly where they need to go. In fact, we have a 98% success rate of books shipped and received. It is with great organization and teamwork that these books end up in the hands of these Majority World scholars, so eager to study and build His Kingdom here on Earth.
